Как выбрать гостиницу для кошек
14 декабря, 2021
Сегодня каждый, кто собирается в отпуск и не знает, с кем оставить своего котика или кошку, может во[...]
PROCESSING
"Expect to have a fire.”
—the concluding sentence in AEC Accident and Fire Prevention issue no. 21,
28 October 1955, "Plutonium Fires”
At 64 years of age, Harold McCluskey was hovering near retirement vintage, but he wanted to pass along his skills as a chemical operator to the dwindling supply of youngsters eager to enter the exciting life of a plutonium production engineer. He worked for the Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company of Richland, located in the middle of absolute nowhere in southeastern Washington State, and he was not in particularly good shape to be punching a clock at Hanford. McCluskey had recovered from a near-fatal heart attack two years before, and three years before that he had an aortic aneurism, treated with a prosthetic graft.
It was August 30, 1976, 2:45 a. m. on the graveyard shift when McCluskey entered the Americium Recovery Room, Building 242-Z of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. The operator on duty turned the recovery task over to him and left, and a few minutes later the junior chemical operator showed up to assist, observe, and learn.
Americium-241 is a transuranic byproduct of plutonium production. Rather than throw it away into the atomic landfill, Atlantic Richfield found that it was a valuable substance that could be sold and offset the cost of making fissile bomb material. This particular nuclide decays with a powerful alpha-particle emission, much like polonium-210, but unlike polonium with its short halflife, this species would outlast a Galapagos tortoise. Only half of it is gone after 433 years, and this makes it an attractive material for use in air-ionizing smoke detectors. Eventually every house in the country will have at least one smoke detector stuck to the ceiling, and that will require a lot of americium. It decays into neptunium-237 with a spray of gamma rays accompanying the alphas. The neptunium stays around for about two million years.
It is removed from fission waste products in very small batches, about 10 grams each, by dissolving it in 7-molar nitric acid and dribbling it down through a long cylindrical column filled with Dowex 50W-X8 ion-exchange resin beads. This process is observed, controlled, and adjusted using a large glove box, which allows the worker to insert his hands into two longsleeved rubber gloves, bolted to the front of a metal workstation. The worker can manipulate objects in the glove box as if they were on a tabletop, yet he or she is completely isolated from the materials in the tightly sealed box, never directly touching anything. No radioactive
contamination can get through the gloves or the box, and the worker is perfectly safe. He or she can see the work through the lead-glass window.
A general-purpose glove box is a simple affair, having a wide, tilted window on the front and two gloves at elbow level, but the americium recovery glove box was tall and rather strange. Each station in the line of americium boxes had not two but six glove positions, so that you could get hold of something at the top, the middle, or the bottom of the 6-foot ion-exchange column. There were seven windows. One long, thin window, right in front of the column, came down from the top, halfway to the floor. Five diamond-shaped windows were spaced all around, and a triangular window was at the top on the right side, all giving special viewing to certain parts of the chemical extraction process. Each window was made of laminated safety glass, to prevent shattering, covered with quarter-inch lead glass for gamma-ray protection. The inside of the box was dominated by the metal column, festooned with a confusion of tubes, valves, and conduits. There was a two-step metal ladder to help you see the top of the column and put your hands into the upper set of gloves. To work in the Americium Recovery Room, you had to love complexity and the fact that not just anybody could do this.
It was unfortunate that the americium recovery had been shut down for five months due to a labor dispute, and starting it up again was not going to be trivial, which is why an old-timer like McCluskey was on board. As it turned out, when the workers struck, the column was left in mid ion-exchange with acid on top of the resin and the drain valve at the bottom closed. In five months of sitting there, the resin beads had compacted into an unnatural configuration, saturated with americium.
McCluskey stood on the top ladder step and opened the valves on the column to get the process started, with the americium dissolved in acid dripping into the resin. Satisfied that it was started, he retraced his steps through a narrow corridor and back to the control panel desk, where the junior engineer was sitting.
He had just sat down, verbally downloading wisdom to his young associate, when the junior engineer interrupted the conversation. He heard something. Hissing. Like, a steam leak? McCluskey got up and went back to the recovery station, listening and following the sound. The entire glove box was filled with dense brown smoke. Uh oh. He shouted to the junior operator, telling him to call the control room up on the fourth floor and ask for help. Junior had just arrived at the glove box. He took one quick look and ran to the intercom back at the desk.
McCluskey climbed the stepladder and put his hands into the top gloves. They felt strangely warm. Had he forgotten to open the drain valve? He tried it. It was already open. He could not see the pressure gauge because the fumes were so dense, but now he could hear a new hiss, out the bottom of the column. He turned his face to the left and called out to junior, “It’s gonna blow!”
WHAM tinkle tinkle. The operator in the control room heard it over the intercom as the resin column disintegrated in a heavy blast, and the junior operator turned around to see the cloud of debris make it through the corridor maze and to the desk. As soon as his ears cleared, he heard McCluskey’s voice. “I can’t see! I can’t see!”
Junior ran to him and found him knocked to the floor, covered with blood, and the room socked in with americium fog. The windows in the glove box were blown all over the room, two gloves had turned inside out, and three gloves were simply gone. He tried to hold his breath as he rolled McCluskey over and helped him crawl back past the desk and to the outer door. Just then, the control-room operator, having heard and felt the explosion, was scrambling down the stairs to see what was going on, and he saw Junior and McCluskey near the door. He called back to the man following behind him, “A tank has blown up. Call the ambulance and shut down the plant as quick as you can.” It was 2:55 a. m., only 10 minutes after McCluskey had clocked in.
At that instant, a health physicist, trained to monitor radiation and assist in any emergency and called “HP,” ambled through the door and immediately perceived that an explosive radiation release had occurred. The potential for further contamination was obvious to him. He held up both hands and said, “Stay right there. I’ll come and get you.” He turned to the control room operator and told him to back off. No sense getting more people contaminated. He opened the emergency cabinet, pulled a respirator mask over his head and tossed one to Junior and one to the control room operator, telling them to put them on.
They tried to keep McCluskey conscious and talking. The glove box had blown up, he said. The last thing he saw was a blue-white flame. HP knew that no criticality alarm had gone off, so it was not a rogue chain reaction with plutonium, as was constantly the concern. It had to have been a chemical reaction, but unfortunately it was a big one. McCluskey’s face and neck, particularly the right side, were perforated with bits of glass, heavily contaminated with radioactive americium-241. His eyes were swollen shut. The right one looked particularly bad, with “black stuff” around it and his right ear, and there was a cut above on his forehead.
At 3:00 am., the ambulance arrived and a nurse, fully decked out in radiation protection clothing, took over. Workers were already putting down plastic sheets on the floor leading to the outer door. The physician-on-call arrived, intending to treat McCluskey for radiation poisoning on the spot, but as he examined the patient it became obvious that a great deal more attention would be required. He and two nurses cleaned him of any obvious contamination, loaded him into the ambulance, and pulled out with full siren and flashing lights at 4:37 am. It was 25 miles to the hospital in Richland. The Geiger counters on board were tapping out gamma-ray hits as fast as possible, sounding like radio static. There was no way to estimate the extent of his americium contamination, because the radiation instruments ran off scale when held to his face or his neck. McCluskey was hot as a pistol. It had to be somewhere between 1 and 5 curies. There had been 17 previous incidents of human americium contamination at Hanford, starting in 1956, but those were all microcuries or nanocuries, a billion times less activity. This was new, unexplored territory.
It was similar to the contamination that the three workers had received at SL-1 back in 1961 in Idaho. They had been standing on the reactor vessel when it steam-exploded, and fuel and fission products, reduced to a fine aerosol, had been driven deeply and irretrievably into their bodies by proximity to the blast. McCluskey’s condition was similar, inoculated by the americium-241. The main difference was that he had survived the explosion. The men at SL-1 had died instantly of the mechanical trauma, before the radiation could have any effect. McCluskey would have to be decontaminated, as if he were a truck sandblasted by an aboveground weapon test, only much more gently.
stage HEPA-filtered exhaust blower took care of the air.159 Closed-circuit television cameras were used for remote viewing, and there was even a room dedicated to medical-equipment decontamination. There were long-term sleeping quarters for contaminated patients. It was not exactly homey, but to have it in place was good planning. HP had called ahead at 3:08 a. m. to activate the facility.
The ambulance arrived at the EDF at 5:14 am., and treatment for McCluskey’s americium contamination began promptly. Bits of glass, metal, resin, acid, and plastic, mostly too small to see and all covered with americium, were embedded in his right face and shoulder. The danger was from it leaking into his bloodstream, which would take it to his bones and liver. That would kill him if left untreated. Fortunately there was a medicine available that would chemically capture any americium in the blood stream and excrete it through the kidneys. This treatment is called chelation therapy, and it had been extensively tested using beagle dogs. The drug, calcium diethylene-triaminepentaacetate or Ca-DTPA, was quite efficient at cleansing the bloodstream of americium, but in large doses it was toxic. The calcium would displace zinc in the delicate human metabolism. There was Zn-DTPA made to eliminate this problem, but there were very limited supplies of it and it had yet to achieve FDA approval. McCluskey would require megadoses of unprecedented size. For the first five days he would receive large doses of Ca-DTPA with zinc sulfide tablets to counteract the zinc depletion. He was immediately given a gram of Ca-DTPA through a 21-gauge needle, and the gate to the road of recovery swung open.
It would be a long journey, but McCluskey was in the most capable hands. By the end of the first day of treatment, the thorough cleanup and chelation start had reduced his level of contamination to 6 millicuries, or reduction by a factor of 1,000. By day five, chemists at the Pacific Northwest Lab in Richland had produced some Zn-DTPA, and permission to use it was granted by the FDA over the phone. X-rays revealed a galaxy of tiny pieces of debris embedded in his face and neck, but there was no way to go after them with surgery. You cannot remove what is too small to see and pick out with tweezers. On day nine McCluskey was up and walking, and on day 12 he was able to walk around outside. He was taking a big dose of Zn-DTPA twice a day, and his only complaint was eye irritation from the acid burns. On
day 22 a splinter was removed from his right cornea, and that helped.
become the Atomic Man. He felt shunned.160
On day 150 of treatment, he was able to return home permanently, visiting the EDF at least twice a week for continued chelation treatment. On day 885 he was taken off Zn-DTPA, and on day 1,115 a slowly decreasing platelet count was noticed, probably due to the continuous radiation exposure. He was put back onto Zn-DTPA on day 1,254, and on day 1,596 his blood platelets were still trending low, but by that time he had bigger health problems. McCluskey died of coronary artery disease, not attributable to radiation, on August 17, 1987. He was 75 years old, and to the last he was in favor of all things nuclear, including nuclear power. He had insisted to all who would get near him that his injuries were a result of an industrial accident and nothing more.
The Atomic Man incident is a representation of the nuclear industry in the late 20th century. It was, even into the 1990s, obsessed with building nuclear weapons. This mission, protected from deep public scrutiny by the often-cited need for national security, seemed to be given priority above any peaceful application of nuclear energy release, and the impression given to the general public continued to erode and distort individual beliefs about the dangerous and the not-dangerous aspects of the industry. It shows that the plutonium production plant in Hanford was better equipped than one might have thought to deal with extreme accidents involving radiation. It also shows that many improvements had been made to the national labs involved in defense nuclear work after the SL-1 explosion, which was a definite wakeup call. McCluskey’s medical treatment was the most advanced state-of-the-art and was expertly applied.
would be formed into shiny, barely subcritical spheres.161
Rocky Flats was a flat mesa covered with rocks, devoid of trees, about 15 miles northwest of Denver, Colorado, bought by Henry Church for $1.25 an acre back in 1869. It was good for grazing cows if you spread them out. Then came World War II, which the United States brought to an end with its new and unique weapons, catapulting technology abruptly forward. Shortly after came the Korean Civil Conflict in 1950, and the United States, weary of war, found itself trying to prevent North Korea from invading South Korea.
President Harry S Truman sought to gather his options. “If we wanted to drop atomic bombs on somebody, how many do we have in stockpile?” he asked.
“Well,” he was told, “at Los Alamos if we use all the parts that are lying around, we can probably put together two of them.”
Johnson of Colorado pushed really hard for his state to be the site of this new venture.162
The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, real-estate division, acquired the 2,560 acres of Rocky Flats from Marcus Church by the 5th Amendment of the Constitution and took possession on July 10, 1951. They offered $15 an acre, but the purchase price bounced around in the courts for a couple of decades. In the meantime, bulldozers gouged out the foundation of Building D, and construction proceeded at a rapid pace. Building D was for final bomb-core assembly using parts made of plutonium, uranium, and stainless steel built in other buildings. It was eventually renamed Building 991. Building C, or 771, was where the plutonium parts were made.
Everybody who worked at or on the plant, more than 1,000 people, had to have a Q clearance from the AEC, requiring extensive background checks of each person, his or her relatives, and everyone he or she knew. A guard shack was built at the entrance to the property. Three layers of barbed-wire-topped fencing and concertina wire were installed, and security holes were closed. By 1953 the plant was tuned up for full bomb production with 15 shielded, windowless buildings. By 1957, there would be 67 buildings on the site, with only its general mission known to those who did not work there. The Rocky Flats facility was thus a prime example of a Cold War battlefield, where front-line fighting was done in locked rooms, paranoia was actively encouraged, and not a shot was ever fired.
Plutonium is an inherently dangerous material to work with, but there are worse, more radioactive substances. The main problem with plutonium or any of the transuranic elements such as uranium or neptunium is its pyrophoric tendency, or the enthusiasm with which it oxidizes. It is similar to wood, in that a fresh-cut log will burn, but ignition is not necessarily easy. You can waste a lot of matches trying to set fire to a log, even though you know it will burn. It is too massive to heat to combustion temperature easily, and the surface area, where burning takes place, is tiny compared to the volume of the heavy piece of wood. If you really want to set fire to it, then carve it into slivers with a knife. Each thin slice of wood is all surface area, without much mass that has to be heated up. Strike a match to a big pile of shavings, fluffed up and full of oxygen-bearing air, and it will burn like gasoline. The same principle applies to metallic plutonium. A billet of it weighing over a pound (under critical mass!) will sit there in air and smolder. Work it down in a lathe, peeling off a pile of curly shavings, and you have made a fire. No match is necessary. Machining and close work with plutonium components must be done in an inert atmosphere, such as argon.
The problem with a plutonium fire is putting it out. Exposure to the usual extinguisher substances, such as water, carbon dioxide, foam, soda-acid, carbon tetrachloride, or dry chemical, can cause an explosion as the extreme chemical reduction scavenges oxygen or chlorine wherever the plutonium can find it. The predominant nuclide, Pu-239, is an alpha — gamma emitter, but it radiates at a slow, 24,000-year half-life, and it is not difficult to shield workers from the radiation. The smoke from burning plutonium is, however, another matter. If you breathe it, the tiny, alpha-active vapor particles lodge in your lungs, and subsequent cancer by genetic scrambling is practically unavoidable. However, the smoke is extremely heavy, and it drops to the ground quickly. It is not something that will rise into the air, drift with a breeze, and contaminate a large city 15 miles away, or even an adjacent building. It travels beyond the burn site on the bottoms of your shoes.
One cannot work in an argon atmosphere for very long without passing out for lack of oxygen, so the plutonium workpieces and the workers must be insulated from each other. At Rocky Flats in Building 771, long lines of stainless steel glove boxes, raised three feet off the ground, were welded together. A worker standing in front of a glove box would insert his hands in the gloves and perform whatever fabrication task was assigned to that position in the line. The small, always subcritical plutonium units were carried on a continuous conveyor belt, made of small platforms linked together. A plutonium thing would move down the line, from glove box to glove box filled with inert argon gas, and the workers could perform close, precision work using the touch-sensitive gloves, looking through Plexiglas windows, with practically zero exposure to radiation. The conveyor could then turn 180 degrees and continue down the next line in the room, with the plutonium object finally being removed from the line once the nickel plating had been applied.
under the boxes without having to crawl.163 The air in each assembly room was kept at below atmospheric pressure using blowers and racks of expensive HEPA filters. Air could therefore not leak out of the building and carry any plutonium oxide dust with it. Air could only leak into the building from outside, through imperfections in the airtight structure or when a door was opened. The world outside the building and certainly beyond the fence line was thus protected from plutonium contamination. Of even greater importance, no enemy could tell what was going on inside the buildings or tell how much was going on by reading the radiation signature at a distance. There was no radiation signature.
Plutonium was shipped to Rocky Flats from Hanford as liquid plutonium nitrate in small stainless steel flasks. Each flask, which held seven ounces of plutonium, was purposely isolated from all other flasks by putting each in the center of a cylinder the size of a truck tire. In Building 771, the flasks were emptied using a tube connected to a vacuum pump, and the liquid was transferred to a tall glass cylinder in a special glove box that looked very similar to the one that blew up at Hanford. Hydrogen peroxide was added to the plutonium nitrate, and a solid, plutonium peroxide or “green cake,” precipitated to the bottom. Moving through the glove-box line, the solid material was washed with alcohol, desiccated using a hair dryer, and pressed into 1.1-pound biscuits.
could produce 26.4 pounds of plutonium.164 This raw material was then transferred to the fabrication line, where it was cast and machined into bomb parts, touched only with rubber gloves.
In 1955, a radical design change for atomic bomb cores came up from Los Alamos. Instead of a solid sphere of plutonium with a small cutout at the center for a modulated neutron source, the new cores would be thin, hollow spheres of alternating uranium-235 and plutonium-239. This design change would result in a lighter bomb that could be lobbed by a compact missile aboard a submarine, a ground-launched anti-aircraft missile, or an air-to-air missile on a fighter plane. It could also be boosted by injecting into the empty space in the core a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases, giving the atomic bomb a kick from hydrogen fusion. The management at Rocky Flats was delighted by the news and said that it should not take more than two years of construction and $21 million to make the necessary improvements to the physical plant.
The improvement schedule was fine, but in the meantime Rocky Flats would have to accommodate the new core design with whatever they could put together quickly. The timing was critical, because the Soviets seemed to be improving their arsenal at an alarming rate, and it was critically important to stay ahead of whatever they were doing. The new hollow core would require a lot more complicated machining and casting. There would be many times more machine cuttings and shavings to be recycled back, and larger lathes would be necessary. The fabrication room in Building 771 became extremely crowded as new box-lines were installed. It was hard to walk in the modified building with all the new glove boxes in the way, and the new lathe boxes were made of Plexiglas on all sides, instead of being a metal box with a Plexiglas window. The machinists had to be able to see the work from any angle, and to make a box out of leaded glass was too expensive. The Plexiglas could catch fire easily, and it was against AEC policy to use it in a plutonium line. The policy was waived under these emergency conditions, as it had been when the windows were installed in the original glove boxes.
With the time-critical, crowded work now at the factory, accidents were inevitable. It was June 1957, and the facility was still dealing with several times more plutonium than it was designed for.
The first problem occurred in the glass column used to mix plutonium nitrate with hydrogen peroxide. When you do too much of it too fast, oxygen builds up and pressurizes the column. One day without warning it exploded, blowing the side off the tall, metal glove box and wetting down two workers with plutonium nitrate. It was similar to the Atomic Man incident that happened two decades later at Hanford, but it was minor compared to the next accident. On September 11 the fabrication space, Room 180, in Building 771 caught fire. It was the result of production stress, exactly a month before the plutonium-conversion reactor at Windscale, England, caught fire for basically the same reason. Resolution of the Rocky Flats fire would be eerily similar to that of the Windscale disaster.
Just on its own, the skull caught fire at about 10:00 P. M. Plutonium burns with a brilliant white heat. Soon the all-Plexiglas glove box was on fire, and Room 180 was filled with smoke. Two security guards discovered it, seeing flames out of the glove boxes reaching for the ceiling. One went for a CO2 fire extinguisher, and the other called the Rocky Flats fire department.
By 10:15 P. M., the firemen under Verle “Lefty” Eminger were unreeling hose and going in, but Bob Vandegriff, the production supervisor, and Bruce Owen, the night radiation monitor, advised that no water be used. There were 137.5 pounds of plutonium in the room. Water covering it would amount to a neutron moderator, and the fissile plutonium could go critical and become a problem even larger than a raging conflagration. The two men quickly dressed down in Chemox breathing apparatus and went in with CO2 extinguishers, which they quickly emptied into the mass of flames. Nothing happened. They retreated, ran down the hall, and found the large fire extinguisher cart, dragged it into the room, which was now fully engaged, and opened the release valve. The firemen watched as the massive blast of carbon dioxide filled the room and engulfed the fire. It had absolutely no effect on the flames. Where was all the fresh air coming from to feed the blaze?
The 771 supervisor, Bud Venable, had been called at home at 10:23 P. M. and told that his building was on fire. Venable worried that the men going into Room 180 would suffocate or pass out in the heat. He ordered that the fans be turned up to the highest speed.
The blowers should have automatically shut down by now because of the heat buildup in the filter bank, but the fire-detection equipment had been disabled earlier because it was always going off and disrupting production. Fire was obviously being sucked into the air vents in the corner of Room 180. Owen was still apprehensive about causing a criticality in the room, but by now Vandegriff was willing to allow the fire department to hose it down with water. He suggested fog nozzles on the inch-and-a-half hose that the firemen had already laid, and told them not to aim at the glove boxes. The flames went down almost immediately.
Eminger and Vandegriff rushed to the second floor to see if the filters were on fire. The filters had not been changed in four years, and there was a large buildup of finely divided plutonium detritus from all the machining. Just as they opened the door, the dust exploded, knocking Vandegriff to the floor and Eminger back through the double doors. The filtering function was destroyed, and plutonium dust was forced to where it would not go if left on its own, up the stack and into the air over Colorado, by the four powerful blowers. The blast was intense enough to dislodge the lead cap on top of the smokestack. By 10:40 P. M., the remains of the filter bank were engulfed in flame, and at 11:10 P. M. the electrical power failed, finally turning the blowers off. By 11:28 the fire was officially extinguished.
Of the plutonium known to be in the building, 18.3 pounds of it could not be found.165
That was the small fire. The big one started in connected Buildings 776-777 on Sunday, May 11, 1969. Mother’s Day.
Small, controllable plutonium fires had become a way of life at Rocky Flats. The fire trucks had been called to hundreds of fires since Building 771 was smoked back in ’57. The worst small fire broke out in 1966, when workers were trying to unclog a drain. In that barely mentionable incident 400 people were contaminated, with most of them inhaling plutonium smoke. Countless fires were smothered in the day-to-day work without calling the fire department or mentioning it to superiors.
Plutonium is a very strange element, and some of its characteristics are not understood. It has seven allotopes, each with a different crystal structure, density, and internal energy, and it can switch from one state to another very quickly, depending on temperature, pressure, or surrounding chemistry. This makes a billet of plutonium difficult to machine, as the simple act of peeling off shavings in a lathe can cause an allotropic change as it sits clamped in the chuck. Its machining characteristic can shift from that of cast iron to that of polyethylene, and at the same time its size can change. You can safely hold a billet in the palm of your hand, but only if its mass and even more importantly its shape does not encourage it to start fissioning at an exponentially increasing rate. The inert blob of metal can become deadly just because you picked it up, using the hydrogen in the structure of your hand as a moderator and reflecting thermalized neutrons back into it and making it go supercritical. The ignition temperature of plutonium has never been established. In some form, it can burst into white-hot flame sitting in a freezer.
Unfortunately, the frequent plutonium fires did not make everyone wary of this bad-behaving material. The effect was just the opposite. Everyone in the plant, starting with the top management, became convinced, at least subconsciously, that a plutonium fire was easy to control and was no big problem. Starting in 1965, there were more than 7,000 pounds of plutonium in Building 776-777 at a given time, and it was not given a second thought. There was a list of dangerous procedures, equipment configurations, and building materials at Rocky Flats that converged on Mother’s Day 1969.
Building 776-777.166
The walls and the glove boxes were flammable, and to top that the hangers on the overhead conveyor belt, used to hook heavy parts and take them to another building, were made of magnesium. Magnesium cut down on the weight, but if it caught fire, it would burn white-hot, like a flare.
On that Mother’s Day in ’69, late in the morning, a heap of oily, plutonium-enriched rags beneath the briquette press spontaneously caught fire. There was nobody at work on the plutonium line that day. The Benelex glove box above the burning rags had a ventilation fan, feeding air into the big filters on the second floor. It pulled the hot air from the fire into the box, where there was a can holding a briquette. Someone had neglected to put the lid on the can. The plutonium briquette caught fire, and it burned white hot. The Benelex glove box started smoldering. It lighted some more briquettes. At this point, the fire alarms should have been blaring and automatically calling the fire department, but the detection equipment had been removed to make room for all the new Benelex shielding. More plutonium ignited. The Plexiglass windows and the rubber gloves caught fire, flaming up, and this left the arm-holes open. Air rushed into the glove boxes and fanned the burning plutonium. The fire moved down the north-south conveyer line, away from the connected building 777, taking everything that would burn.
It was not your average industrial fire. In the black smoke the plutonium and the magnesium were burning furiously, and the room was lighted up like a new shopping center opening, even as the fluorescent lights melted and came crashing down on the firemen. Molten lead from the gamma-ray shielding was hitting the floor in globs, and even the glue used to hold the Benelex together was on fire. The Styrofoam in the roof started melting, and the tar on top was getting soft. The powerful blowers were pulling air through the wall on the second floor, just as they were supposed to do, and the filters were already burning. All seemed lost when, in a miraculous stroke of good fortune, a fireman accidentally backed a truck into a power pole and killed the electricity to the building. The fans squeaked to a stop.
Firefighters in full radiation gear were now able to enter the room without being incinerated by
the air-fed flames.167 They came into the crowded space spraying water, and when they moved from line to line, they had to go under, using the sheep dips. The ravines were now filled with water, so it was like wading through a creek in a space suit, up to your chest. The firemen noticed that the oxidized plutonium powder stuck together when wet, like gray Play-Doh. They tried to corral it into a corner using the high-pressure hoses. Fortunately it was too sticky, and it clung to the floor. If they had been able to push it with the hoses as they desired, it would have assumed a critical shape and killed them all with an unshielded supercriticality.
By 8:00 P. M., the fire was declared not burning, but the wet plutonium was still flaring up as late as Monday morning. The AEC investigated the cause of the accident, and its report, criticizing both itself and Dow Chemical for allowing obvious safety lapses, was classified SECRET. With $70.7 million in damages, it broke the record for industrial loss in a fire in the United States. The report from the fire in 1957 had apparently not been read, possibly because it too was SECRET, and no lessons had been learned and applied to preventing further plutonium fires. There were no injuries, and no wind-borne contamination of the surrounding area was detected. Connected Buildings 776-777 were turned into a large parking lot.
The parts built at Rocky Flats, Colorado, were shipped to the Pantex bomb assembly plant, about 17 miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas, to be made into nuclear weapons. Before 1942, Pantex was a large, 16,000-acre, utterly flat wheat field; but with the pressing need for bombs to drop in World War II, an ordnance factory was built on the site. For the next three years, thousands of workers loaded gravity bombs and artillery shells with TNT. It was dangerous work, and an unusual amount of care was needed to keep from accidentally blowing everything up. The pay was good, but there was no smoking. All nicotine-delivery systems had to be held in the mouth, closed, and chewed. At the end of the war, on VJ Day, the plant was deactivated, and the workers had to find something else to do.
laundry detergent, was put in charge.168 The metal parts for the bombs, including the fissile material, were built elsewhere, but at Pantex the chemical explosives used to set off the nuclear detonations were cast and machined to fit, as if they were made of plastic.
The nuclear weapons used by the United States were almost all “implosion” types, in which the fissile material is forced into a hypercritical configuration using a hollow sphere of high explosives. The shell of explosive material is assembled from curved segments, like a soccer ball. In a normal explosion of a sphere, such as a hand grenade, a detonator at the center of the explosive sets it off. The explosion starts at the point of detonation and moves rapidly outward in a spherical wave-front until the entire mass of explosive is burned up. The wavefront then proceeds outward, as a sphere of compressed gas moving outward very fast. The spherical wave grows larger and larger, and the energy imparted to it by the brief explosion becomes stretched thinner and thinner. Far enough from the explosion, it is no longer strong enough to knock you down, and the destructive explosion is reduced to a loud noise as the energy pulse is spread out over the entire surface area of the sphere.
The implosion works in reverse. Instead of being detonated from a point in the middle, the sphere of explosive must be detonated from its entire outer surface. There is still a spherical wave-front that starts at the surface heading away from the bomb, but this is a waste of energy. There are two wave-fronts. One heads out, and one heads in. Inside the sphere, the wave-front grows smaller and smaller as it heads for the center. The energy from the brief explosion, instead of being dispersed and losing impact, is concentrated down, losing nothing. At the center of the sphere is a small ball of plutonium. The converging wave-front hits it so hard, it bends the molecular forces that are maintaining its density, and it shrinks to a concentrated, smaller size. This new configuration makes it hypercritical. Flying neutrons do not have as far to travel to hit a nucleus, and with the nuclei crowded closer together, it becomes hard to miss. The ball explodes with a sudden release of nuclear power.
The problem is detonating the entire outer surface of the sphere all at once. It is not really possible to do so. The best you can do is to set off about 40 point-detonators placed around the outside of the explosive shell. These can be made to all go off at once, but the explosion does not make a perfectly spherical wave-front. To form this unacceptable, knobby wave-front into a perfect sphere does not require expertise in making hand grenades. It requires optics.
Optics is the art of taking a wave-front of light and warping it into a desired shape using the fact that light travels at different speeds in air and glass. When a light wave traveling in air hits clear glass, it must slow down, and if it hits at an angle, then it is bent, or refracted. Controlling the angle at which the light encounters the glass controls the refraction. This is accomplished by grinding the glass into a curved surface, specifically designed to bend the incoming wave-front into the desired shape. This is how telescopes, microscopes, and vision-correcting glasses are made.
The chemical explosives in an atomic bomb work exactly the same way. There are actually two, nested explosive shells. The outer shell, having the point-detonators, is a fast explosive, producing a high-speed shock wave. The inner shell is a slower explosive, making a lower — speed shock wave. The interface between the two shells is shaped in very specific ways to refract the segmented knobs of the outer shell explosion into a perfectly spherical shock wave in the inner shell, based on the difference in wave-speed in the two media. Explosion in the outer shell is caused by little firecracker-like detonators, and the inner shell is set off by the shock-wave from the outer shell hitting it. Shaping of the solid explosive segments to make this happen must be precise, and one must be careful not to impart a shock to the explosive while machining it.
triaminotrinitrobenzine (TATB).169
Making bombs less bulky was all well and good, but as the energy from the explosives became concentrated into smaller spaces, they got touchy, or very sensitive to being slapped. There were three accidental explosion events in the 1960s, when improper handling procedures led to detonations, but there were no deaths. All operations at the plant were carefully sequestered, with strong blast walls separating an operation from all other operations and not letting an accident become a catastrophe, setting off adjacent explosives or even setting off a nuclear event. All steps of explosive manufacture were done in the smallest possible batches.
On March 30, 1977, the luck ran out at Pantex in Building 11-14A, Bay 8. A machinist had chucked a billet of high explosive in the lathe chuck and turned it by hand to see how it would spin. It was slightly out of alignment, running a bit wobbly on the lathe spindle, and at cutting speed it would vibrate. This is a common occurrence when using a gear-chuck on a lathe. As careful as you are, the work-piece will not necessarily sit right in the chuck when you tighten it up. To remedy this, an experienced machinist will pick up his much-used wooden mallet and tap the piece into alignment, hitting it on the edge that causes the most “run-out.” The last thing the machinist saw was the mallet coming down on the edge of the explosive work-piece. He and two others died instantly in the blast.
The Energy Research and Development Administration report on the accident was issued on March 1, 1979. The sensitive PBX-9404 fast explosive was replaced by less sensitive PBX — 9502, and a movement to change out all the aging, increasingly sensitive explosives in weapons on the shelf gained attention. A Department of Energy Explosive Safety Manual, DOE M 440.1-1A, was in place by the mid-1990s. Pantex is still in business, refurbishing and repairing our aging inventory of weapons, which is probably about 2,200 units.
These misfortunes in the production of nuclear devices are interesting, but none were true atomic accidents. They were industrial accidents of types that could occur anywhere in the technosphere. Authentic nuclear accidents in fuel processing, usually but not always for bomb manufacture, did occur, unlike anything in the history of technology. Some were predictable, and some were not. There have been 22 documented cases of process accidents in which an unexpected criticality occurred in the United States, Russia, Great Britain, and Japan. In these incidents, there were nine fatalities due to close exposure to radiation from self-sustained fission. Accidents occurred with the fissile material in a solution or slurry in 21 cases, and one occurred in a pile of metal ingots. No criticalities were the result of powered fissile material. No accident has occurred in the transportation of fissile material or while it was being stored. Of the many survivors of criticality accidents, three had limbs amputated due to vascular system collapse. Only one incident exposed the public to radiation. There was a clump of 17 accidents between 1957 and 1971, and only two have occurred since.
The tanks were part of the chemical separation system, meant to recover plutonium from machine-shop waste, leftovers in melting crucibles, or slag from casting. The tanks typically held aqueous solutions that were about 0.1 gram of plutonium per liter, which was way below anything that could be made critical, but the tanks, which had been in daily use for the past seven years, were obsolete, and they were scheduled to be replaced soon. They were still in fine condition, but they had been made in a perfect shape for accidental criticality. They had the surface-area-minimizing shape of a soup can, and the ends were rounded. By now it was realized that this was a dangerous shape, even though the procedures were designed to absolutely prohibit there ever being enough plutonium in one tank to go critical. The replacement tanks would be 10 feet high and six inches in diameter, which would discourage anything less than solid plutonium from becoming a runaway reactor.
vessels and transferred to this particular tank. Allowed to sit for a while, the liquid had separated into 87 gallons of water in the bottom of the tank with 42 gallons of oily solvent sitting on top of the water. This was to be expected, which is why there was an aggressive stirring mechanism built into the tank. Unknown to anyone, plutonium solids, built up from years of processing, had dissolved off the insides of the tanks upstream and landed in this tank. The water in the bottom had only 2 ounces of plutonium dissolved in it, but the thin, disc-like layer of solvent on top contained a barely subcritical 6.8 pounds of plutonium, helped along in its quest to go critical by being homogeneously mixed with a hydrocarbon liquid, an excellent neutron moderator.
|
|
It was hard to predict this accident, except for the fact that the steel tank, built to use as little metal as possible, was an ideal shape for nuclear criticality using uranium dissolved in a liquid. When the electric motor was started to stir the two solutions together, it formed a whirlpool in the center. Instead of mixing immediately, the organic solution containing uranium was suddenly reduced in diameter and surrounded by water, making it a supercritical nuclear reactor.
Cecil Kelley had spent the last 11.5 years as a plutonium-process operator at Los Alamos
A blast of heat washed over the front of Kelley’s body, going clean through him and coming out the back. It was like being in a microwave oven, as fast neutrons saturated his insides, exchanging momentum with his comparatively still hydrogen nuclei. He felt the strange tingling from gamma rays ionizing the sensitive nerve endings. A rushing noise was coming from the tank, over the whir of the stirring motor. Boiling? There was a slight tremor, moving the tank sideways very slightly, one centimeter, as it walked across the floor on its four legs. He fell backward onto the concrete floor. Dazed and confused, he got to his feet, turned off the stirrer with another push of the button, then turned it back on and ran out of the building.
Two other process workers in the same room saw a flash of blue light on the ceiling, as if a photoflash had gone off, and then they heard a dull thud. No criticality alarms went off, but they both knew that something bad had happened. They rushed to help Kelley and found him outside. He had lost control of his limbs. “I’m burning up!” he cried. “I’m burning up!” They hustled him to the emergency shower, turning off the stirrer as they passed it.
In a few minutes the medical emergency and radiation monitoring staff arrived. Kelley was in deep shock, phasing in and out of consciousness. He looked sunburned all over. By 4:53 they had him in the ambulance and headed for the lab hospital. The radiation monitors ran their Geiger counters over the tank. It was hot—tens of rads per hour. It was the remnant of a criticality in the tank, but how?
of solvent became prompt supercritical, releasing a blast of fast neutrons and gamma rays.171 The criticality only lasted for 0.2 seconds, but in that brief spike there were 1.5 з 1017 fissions. When the two fluids mixed together under the continued influence of the impeller, the plutoniumladen solvent was diluted by the water. The plutonium nuclei became too separated from one another for adequate neutron exchange, and the criticality died off as quickly as it had started.
Kelley’s condition was dire. He was semiconscious, retching, vomiting, and hyperventilating. His lips were blue, his skin was dusky red-violet, and his pulse and blood pressure were unobtainable. He was shaking, and his muscles were convulsing uncontrollably. His body was radioactive from neutron activation.
After an hour and forty minutes, he settled down and was perfectly coherent. He was moved to a private room. The staff drew blood and tried to get an estimate of his radiation dose from counting the activated sodium-24 in the sample. He had absorbed about 900 rad from fast neutrons and somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 rad from gamma rays. A dose of 1,000 rad was thought fatal.172 His bone marrow had changed to inert, fatty tissue. He started having severe, uncontrollable pain in his abdomen, and he turned an ashen gray. At 35 hours after he had touched the stirrer switch, Cecil Kelley died.
The plutonium process was shut down for six weeks and the tanks were ripped out and replaced with the six-foot columns, as had been planned but put off.
Back in the 1960s, all the fuel reprocessing was not for weapons work, and all was not government-owned. There were also privately owned plants. The early startups were not large operations, but the ultimate goal was to take the spent fuel from power company reactors, extract the unused uranium, sell plutonium waste to the government, compact the fission products for efficient burial, and deprive the Canadians of a monopoly on the manufacture of medical isotopes, such as technetium-99M. Spent reactor fuel was seen as a cash cow, and not as a burden on the power industry. Fuel reprocessing was also considered a necessity for commercial breeder reactor operations, and breeders were expected to start coming online later in the decade.
|
Spent reactor fuel is mostly unused uranium, which is a natural part of the Earth’s crust and not particularly dangerous. If it could be processed down to the 1.4% that is highly radioactive, nuclear waste disposal would be much easier and reusable fuel would not be wasted. |
then washed of kerosene residue using trichloroethylene, referred to as “TCE.”174
Robert Peabody, 37 years old, lived in nearby Charlestown with his wife, Anna, and their nine children, ranging from nearly 16 years to six months old, and he worked the second shift at the recovery plant. During the day, he worked as an auto mechanic, managing with two jobs to support his family. It was Friday, July 24, 1964, and Peabody had taken time off from his day job to go food shopping. It was getting close to 4:00 P. M. He dropped Ann and the dozen grocery bags at the house and took the five-minute drive to the plant.
The fuel recovery facility was a cluster of nondescript, windowless buildings, no more than three stories tall, painted a cheerful robin’s-egg blue. They were set far back from the road and surrounded by an imposing chain-link fence on a flat, 1,200-acre plot. Peabody clocked in, as usual, and changed into his coveralls.
It had been a nerve-racking week at the plant, mainly due to false criticality alarms. When processing nuclear materials, working with highly enriched uranium in aqueous solutions was about as dangerous as it could get, and an accidental criticality was something to be avoided at all costs. Wednesday he had been working on the second floor, washing down some equipment, when the criticality alarm sounded. Having it blare off nearby was like having a tooth drilled. He and the other four workers left the building in a hard sprint. It took a while to figure out that there was no danger, and that water had splashed into some electrical contacts. The radiation-detection equipment was set to be nervous and sensitive to the slightest provocation.
Later on the same shift, they discovered a substance technically designated “black goo” collecting at the end of the line where uranium was supposed to be coming out. The next day, the line had to be shut down, and everything had to be taken apart and cleaned, and the labeling conventions got a little scrambled as parts and wet rags and bottles were scattered around.
Most of chemical engineering practice had been fully automated by 1964, but this part of nuclear engineering, which was actually similar to other parts of nuclear engineering, seemed based in the nineteenth century. Processing nuclear fuel at this level was an astonishingly manual operation, requiring human beings to carry bottles of liquid material by hand and empty them into vats, tanks, or funnels at the tops of vertical pipes. The system was mostly gravity — driven, with liquid flowing naturally from the top floor to the ground floor in the plant. Somehow it seemed safer to have men carry around batches of uranium in small quantities, knowing exactly where and when it was to be transferred, than letting uncaring machinery do it.
The problem with the polyethylene bottles was labeling them to identify the contents. Paper labels stuck on with Scotch tape would come off easily, because the bottles were frequently covered with slippery kerosene residue. The only way to get a label to stick was to hold it on with two rubber bands. On Thursday, the day shift was cleaning out the black goo in the system, and they found a plug of uranium nitrate crystals clogging a pipe. They cleaned it out with steam and drained the highly concentrated, bright yellow solution into polyethylene anticriticality bottles. Paper labels were attached with rubber bands identifying them as containing a great deal of highly enriched uranium.
Five people at any one time ran the entire plant. On the night shift it was three young technicians, Peabody, George Spencer, and Robert Mastriani, the supervisor, a 30-year-old chemist named Clifford Smith, and the security guard. The plant superintendent, Richard Holthaus, was usually there during the day.
The back-breaking task of the evening was to clean the TCE, which had been used to wash the kerosene out of the uranium concentrate. It was expensive stuff, and it had to be recycled back into the process, but it always picked up a little uranium oxide when washing out the oil. The uranium was separated out of the TCE by adding some sodium carbonate and precipitating it to the bottom of the vessel. This process, like others in the plant, was carried out in small batches, and a shift-load of bottles loaded with dirty TCE was bunched up in safe carts. Peabody was expected to pick up each 35-pound bottle of solution, pour in some carbonate, and shake it for 20 minutes to ensure mixing. There had to be a better way.
Another way of agitating the TCE had been worked out in a previous shift. Weary of manipulating the heavy bottles, a technician had noticed that on the third floor was a perfectly good mixing bowl with a motorized stirrer, and why couldn’t we use that to slosh the TCE? It is not recorded, but I am sure he got the standard nuclear-work answer from the supervisor: “No! Give me a few minutes, and I will think of why you can’t do that.” Technicians could not be allowed to improve operating procedures on a whim. Eventually, the technician was able to wear down the supervisor, and word of an undocumented labor-saving procedure traveled through the plant with the speed of sound. The vessel in question, the carbonate make-up mixer, was about 18 inches in diameter and 26 inches tall, or the size and shape of a very efficient submarine reactor core. It was okay to use it, as long as the uranium content in what it was mixing was less than 800 parts per million, or very, very dilute.
It was nearly 6:00 P. M. Peabody rolled the safe cart with the first bottle in the cluster of what he assumed were bottles of TCE to be cleaned to the base of the stairs. The cart would not make it up the stairs, so he hefted the bottle to his shoulder. The label slipped out of the rubber bands and fluttered to the floor. The contents of this bottle looked about like the stuff in all the bottles. It was yellow, due to the extreme fluorescence of uranium salt, but this was not a bottle of contaminated TCE: it was uranium nitrate dissolved in water, from the black goo cleanout.
It was about as much work to get it up the stairs as it would be to shake the bottle, but Peabody arrived on the third floor, dragged the bottle over to the mixer, and unscrewed the top. The mixer was against the north wall of the room, held a couple of feet off the floor by metal legs, making the rim five feet high. The stirrer motor was hanging over the open top. Workers were protected from falling off the third floor and to the ground floor by a railing on either side of the narrow platform. Leaned against the railing on the right side, very near the mixer, was a folded two-section ladder, lying on its side.
Peabody ran full tilt down the stairs, out the door, and was quickly making for the emergency shack, 450 feet away. His fellow workers were right behind him, fleeing the criticality alarm and watching Peabody tear his clothes off. He almost made it, but he fell to the ground naked, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth and ears. Smith, the supervisor, ran to call Holthaus while Spencer and Mastriani grabbed a blanket from the shack and tried to wrap the injured man on the ground. He got up twice and tried to walk around, but he sank back to the ground with severe stomach cramps.
Soon the company officials and the police were backed up at the gate, and Peabody was loaded into the ambulance. His wife and eldest son, Charles “Chickie” Peabody, were found by a police officer. “There’s been an accident,” he began. “We’ll take you to the hospital.”
The stirring motor coasted to a stop, and the deep, funnel-shaped maelstrom in the mixer vessel relaxed to a momentarily flat surface, before the mixture started another furious boil. The radiation caught Smith in the back as he was hurrying through the doorway. Fortunately for Holthaus, Smith’s body shielded him from the neutrons and he only got a 60-rad dose. Smith at least was not standing directly over the mixer, but he got a serious 100-rad blast of mixed radiation, head to toe.
In its spinning configuration, the uranium-water mixture was a good configuration only when there was a great deal of excess reactivity (uranium) in the mixer. It boiled away the excess until the contents went barely subcritical and the reaction stopped. Holthaus then removed the empty bottle, which was a non-productive void in the would-be reactor, and he stopped the spinning. The surface area of the geometric shape in the mixer went down as the stuff stopped spinning, and the lack of a bottle-shaped void made it complete. The mixture once again went
supercritical.175 The two men were unaware of it, as they were both looking down into the stairwell when it happened, and the alarm was still blaring from the first criticality. Feeling a little strange, they returned to the ground floor, turned off the alarm, and took half an hour draining the mixer.
At the hospital, Anna and Chickie were cautioned to stand at the foot of the bed. Peabody was radioactive, conscious, lucid, and restless. He was given a sedative. “Somebody put a bottle of uranium where it wasn’t supposed to be,” he told them. By Sunday morning he was starting to slip away. His left hand, the one that had held the front of the bottle, was swelling up, and his wedding band had to be sawed off. He drifted off into a coma, and that evening, 49 hours after he saw the blue flash, Robert Peabody died. His exposure had been 10,000 rads, or enough to kill him ten times.
Smith and Holthaus survived with no lasting effects, but they had to give up the silver coins in their pockets, which had been partly activated into radioactive silver isotopes by the neutron bombardment and were quickly decaying into stable cadmium. They were saved only by the distance between them and the supercriticality event and not by any cautious prescience. The walls on the third floor were decontaminated, and production resumed by February 1965. Contracts gradually dwindled away, and the plant closed for good in 1980. Robert Peabody was the first civilian to die from acute radiation exposure in the United States. So far, he was also the only one.
Impressed by the flash-bang end to World War II, the Soviet Union was quick to replicate the nuclear materials production facilities used by the United States. The U. S., in an unprecedented show of openness and generosity, published the final report for the atomic bomb development project, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, or The Smyth Report, in hardback three days after the Empire of Japan surrendered. It included a map of the Hanford Works, a detailed photo, and an explanation as to how we manufactured the synthetic fissile nuclide plutonium — 239. It was available to anyone in the world with $1.25 to invest, and many copies were bought
for use by Soviet scientists and engineers, eager to get started.176
The robust Soviet building program produced the Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant, the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentration Camp, the Siberian Chemical Combine, and, most impressive of all, the Mayak Production Association, covering 35 square miles of flat wilderness.
The production reactors and plutonium extraction plants were built and running by 1948, and the site was treated as the deepest military secret in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not trusting anyone with anything, the Soviet government was careful not to divulge what was going on at Mayak, particularly to the thousands of people who worked there. This policy resulted in a lack of essential knowledge among the workers, and studies have blamed this for the 19 severe radiation accidents at the site occurring from 1948 through 1958. Among the 59 people who suffered from the effects of radiation exposure, six men and one woman died in criticality accidents. Since the cluster of accidents in those early years of nuclear weapons production, there have been 26 more accidents at Mayak that we know of.
Mayak was an irritating black hole in the intelligence community. It was literally a blank spot on the map of the Soviet Union, and it seemed important to know what was going on there. On
after frame as Powers guided it over the plutonium plant.177
Unfortunately for Powers, Eisenhower, and the CIA reconnaissance-photo analysts, the Soviets sent up everything they had against the U-2 flying over their most secret installation. An entire battery of eight S-75 Dvina surface-to-air missiles to blow it up, a MiG-19 fighter jet to shoot it down, and a Sukhoi Su-9 interceptor just to ram into it were deployed in anger. The first S-75 blew up somewhere behind the U-2. It did not hit the plane, but the U-2 was fragile, built only to take pictures and not to withstand roughhousing. The shock wave from the missile destructing in air folded up the U-2 like a wadded piece of junk mail. A second missile shot down the MiG-19, another one caused the Su-9 to auger in, and the remaining five missiles were simply wasted.
with the Soviets getting back their ace spy, Rudolf Abel.178 Mayak remained a mystery until 1992, when the Soviet Union fell apart and true glasnost, or openness, spilled it all.
Of the many ghastly accidents at Mayak, one stands out as unusual and worth a detailed look. Mayak was run under war footing, as were the atomic bomb labs in the United States during World War II, and most workers were undertrained. Carelessness and minimal safety considerations led to many problems, but in this case the participants were nuclear experts near the top of the food chain, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
It was 7:00 In the basement was a long, narrow room, having two 1,000-liter tanks bolted to the concrete floor. Four and a half feet above the concrete was built a raised floor with the tops of the two tanks protruding through it. The tanks were used to temporarily hold very dilute mixtures of plutonium salt and water originating upstairs. The pipes had been changed, and there was some resulting confusion as to what the tanks were connected to. Along the walls were two shelves. You entered the room by climbing seven wooden steps to the open doorway, and on the shelf to your left sat an unauthorized stainless steel bucket with two handles. It looked like a cookpot stolen from the cafeteria kitchen, probably used to make soup. It had no business being in the same room with plutonium extract. It could hold 60 liters of fluid.
Scene of the Mayak criticality accident, shown from the side. The first criticality occurred when an inappropriate amount of fissile material was transferred into the tank on the left.
thought it prudent to find out how much plutonium was sitting in the tank, and he instructed one of the operators to take a sample and have it analyzed. The operator lowered a small glass vial into the tank through a sensor port on top, filled it with fluid, and sent it upstairs to be evaluated.
The sample contained about 0.6 grams of plutonium per liter of fluid. The tank was nearly full, holding 800 liters of liquid. Supervisor made a quick calculation. That meant that there were 480 grams of plutonium in tank 2, which was a nearly ideal shape for criticality. The safety limit for the tank was 400 grams, and he found this puzzling. How could the tank have 480 grams of plutonium in it when 400 was the cutoff for criticality? He ordered operator to take two more samples and confirm it.
While lifting out another sample, operator noticed that the tank was not completely filled with the organic solutions, as they had feared. In fact, it was mostly filled with a weak solution of plutonium in water, with their experimental, oily, concentrated solutions having floated to the top and sitting in a thin disk-shaped layer in the tank. This explained why the tank had not gone supercritical when filled, and supervisor felt slightly better. There may have been enough plutonium in the organic layer to go critical, but only if it were shaped like the entire tank and not spread into a thin layer on top of the water. The process downstream of tank 2 was not set up to work on organic solvents, so they had better decant it off the top of the water before something happened. They found a 20-liter glass bottle, normally used to hold chemical reagents, a two-hole stopper, and two rubber hoses. Operator put the bottle on the shelf, connected the hoses to the stopper, and connected one hose to an active vacuum port on top of tank 1, which was completely empty. He connected the second hose to the stopper and lowered the open end of it into the wide access port on tank 2, being careful to let it suck fluid only from the thin layer of organic solvent on top. The oily stuff was dark brown, indicating that it was thoroughly loaded with plutonium.
Satisfied that all was well, the supervisor left his two operators with the task and went to see how the rest of the shift was performing. When the bottle looked about full, the operators pulled the stopper loose, hefted the 17 liters, and poured it into the big pot, still up on the shelf. One operator had to go to his other duties, and the other found the supervisor to ask him, what next? The supervisor told him to make sure it was all gone out of the tank. By being mindful of the depth of the end of the rubber hose, operator was able to suck out another 20 liters into the bottle, filling it to the top.
Operator pulled the stopper and started emptying the bottle into the big pot up on the shelf. The liquid, a mixture of two plutonium-extraction experiments, was thick, with globs in it. It poured slowly, but the bottle was gradually getting lighter and easier to hold. BANG! A flash of blue light filled the room, and the operator felt the sudden blast of heat hit him right in the face. He instinctively dropped the bottle. It crashed to the floor, sending shards of broken glass and dissolved plutonium scattering across the floor, out the door, dripping down the steps, and to the floor drain. The criticality alarm in the building went off immediately, along with the criticality alarm in the next building, 50 yards away. Everybody in both buildings dropped what they were doing and hastened for the escape tunnels.
The building radiation-control supervisor was the only one not leaving. He switched into emergency mode and made sure that everyone surrendered his or her personal dosimeter before getting away. He then ran into the operator, looking frightened and in shock, and he directed the injured man to decontamination and medical care. Everyone was ordered to not go back into the building until the reason for the criticality alarm could be determined and made safe.
The oily mixture in the stainless steel pot had heated instantly to the boiling point upon going critical, and the resulting thermal expansion turned off the chain reaction. The supercritical condition in these very small, unplanned reactors teeters on a knife-edge, and the slightest modification of the density, the total mass, or the shape of the reactor can shut it down as quickly as it came into being. There it sat, undisturbed, until 11:30 P. M., when, having cooled, it suddenly lapsed again into criticality and faded out when the liquid re-heated. This time, the reaction was too weak to set off the criticality alarm, and nobody was there to be harmed by the mixed radiation pulse.
The shift supervisor was feeling dread about how completely he had botched his experimental program. He had a strong urge to erase what he had done, resetting the situation to normal conditions, but to set everything right he had to get back into the room. The radiation supervisor would hear none of it, but the shift supervisor was adamant. Finally, radiation agreed to follow shift to the area and scope out the extent of the contamination. As they neared the doorway to the tank room, the rate meter on the gamma-sensitive “cutie pie” instrument slid off scale. The room was hot with fission products, and it would be crazy to go in there. Wait for the clean-up team to dress out in radiation suits and come up with a plan to disable the reactor.
Shift supervisor was too impatient for that. Somehow, he talked the radiation supervisor into
leaving him standing in front of the room while he went to check something.179 Shift supervisor, seeing radiation supervisor turn a corner, raced up the steps into the tank room. He saw the pot on the shelf and quickly scoped the problem. The pot was cooling down, and he had to do something very soon, before it had a chance to go critical again. He took the handles in both hands and lifted the pot, planning to dump its contents down the steps and into the floor drain. The plutonium mixture would be so spread out into a thin puddle, it could not possibly regain criticality. The thing was a lot heavier than it looked, and he managed a controlled fall to the floor. It hit with a wet thud, right in the middle of the puddle of plutonium solution.
dead man walking.180
The operator who had made the first criticality suffered from acute, severe radiation sickness. He had absorbed 700 rems of mixed radiation. His vascular system collapsed, and eventually one hand and both legs had to be amputated, but he was still alive 34 years after the accident. A little over a month after the accident, the shift supervisor died.
Mayak is still in business, and safety conditions improved over the decades from “medieval” to levels in keeping with 21st-century handling of radioactive and potentially critical materials.
The last fatal accident due to an unplanned criticality occurred in Japan in 1999, in a publicly owned nuclear-fuel-processing plant. This accident was unusual in that the criticality was not over in a flash, but would continue to react for an impressive 20 hours, and the two men who died broke the records for length of survival after receiving lethal radiation dosage. It was similar to the previous accident in Rhode Island, in that a break with the standard procedure to make the work easier led to the criticality, and even in 1999 the fuel processing incorporated a surprising amount of manual labor. It was also the first and only criticality accident in which members of the public not involved with uranium processing were exposed to measurable radiation.
1993, but it was only licensed to process low-enriched fuel, about five percent U-235.181 Competition with foreign companies doing the same thing was stiff and production efficiency always needed tightening, but in 1993 the company sold ¥3,276,000,000, or $32,760,000, worth of product.
In 1983, a small facility, the Fuel Conversion Test Building, was erected to be used for special products. The plant’s license was modified to allow the processing of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent U-235 so that startup fuel for the Joy о fast breeder reactor could be produced. Joy о needed fuel enriched to 18.8 percent U-235. Care was supposedly taken in the building’s design to ensure that no enriched uranium would ever be in a critical-sized or — shaped container, so no criticality alarms were called for in the license. An accidental criticality of any
kind in this facility, run by highly disciplined Japanese laborers, was not a credible scenario.182 Gamma-ray detectors were bolted to the walls in all the buildings, in case some mildly radioactive fuel was somehow misplaced.
A step in the licensed procedure for making highly enriched uranyl nitrate was to mix uranium oxide powder and nitric acid together in a dissolver tank. As the nitrate product dripped through the dissolver, it was conveyed by a stainless steel pipe to a long, thin stainless steel holding vessel, specifically designed not to allow a critical mass of liquefied uranium solution to exist in it. The uranyl nitrate solution was then drained out the bottom of the vessel into small polyethylene bottles, each holding a non-critical four liters of solution. A little petcock on the bottom of the vessel controlled the flow into a bottle held under it. Just follow the procedure, being careful not to stack the bottles close together, of course, and nothing can happen.
In 1998 the company’s name was shortened to JCO, requiring less ink to print. By then the fuel-conversion business had fallen to 53 percent of the peak back in 1993, but in September 1999 JCO won a contract to convert 16.8 kilograms of uranium into uranyl nitrate for Joyo. On
There was an immediate problem. The drain petcock on the bottom of the long, thin holding vessel was only four inches off the floor. There was no way to fit a bottle under it. The resourceful workers decided to mix the uranium oxide with acid in a 10-liter stainless steel bucket instead. They could then tip the bucket, pour the solution into a five-liter glass Erlenmeyer flask, and then dump it directly into Precipitation Tank B, which had an electrically driven stirrer. This would save time by not having the solution sit around in little four-liter bottles, and the stirrer in Tank B would do the job a lot faster than just letting it drip through the dissolver. This plan indicated a weak understanding of the factors that lead to criticality. True, 45 liters of 18.8-percent enriched uranium solution is not critical, but only if it is in a geometry that does not encourage criticality, such as the long, thin tank. The 100-liter Precipitation Tank B was round and short, meant to incorporate as little expensive stainless steel as possible in its design, and it was therefore an ideal reactor vessel.
Ouchi stood on the metal platform surrounding the top of the tank, holding a glass funnel with his body draped over it. Shinohara climbed the metal steps to the platform, carefully cradling the flask full of solution, and poured it slowly into the funnel. Yokokawa sat at a desk nearby and completed the paperwork. By quitting time, they had successfully processed four batches, now sitting in Precipitation Tank B.
|
It is always dangerous to have a liquid containing uranium and a vessel of the right size and shape to make a reactor in the same building. By simplifying a transfer process, workers at JCO in Japan managed to make a supercritical reactor. |
Next morning, it was more of the same. By 10:35 am. they had done two more batches, and they were almost through pouring the last of batch number seven into the tank. There were 0.183 liters left in the flask. Drip. Drip. There was a blue flash out the open port, lighting up the ceiling. Shinohara and Ouchi staggered down the steps, starting to feel strange. Then came extreme abdominal pain, waves of nausea, and difficulty taking a breath. Yokogawa looked up from his paperwork and turned in his seat, quizzical. The three workers had no idea what had happened, but the gamma-ray alarms were sounding. Ouchi had lost control of his muscles and was sinking into incoherence. His two fellow workers helped him out of the building. Someone had released gamma radiation somewhere in the plant, and they had to get out of the building. The unshielded reactor they had assembled in Precipitation Tank B was still running at power, boiling the uranium solution and broadcasting a deadly mix of gamma rays and neutrons in all directions.
Workers in all three buildings were streaming out and going to the emergency mustering point as the gamma-ray alarms rang everywhere. A worker from the building next door noticed that three guys from the Fuel Conversion Test Building looked injured and confused. He summoned an ambulance, and they were quickly removed to the nearest hospital.
People high up in the organization began to realize that there had to be a criticality on site, and it looked as if it was in the Fuel Conversion Test Building from the high gamma readings near it. No concentration of the gamma rays from uranium could make radiation with this intensity. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, but not that radioactive. Somewhere, a reactor was running. Studying the pen-chart recordings, they could see that it had started up with a large surge of supercriticality, then settled down into quasi-stable critical condition, and the power level dropped gradually by about half in the next 17 hours. They had to find a way to shut it down.
A plan was worked out to kill the chain reaction, and workers volunteered to execute it shortly after midnight on October 1. Precipitation Tank B was water-cooled by a jacket encircling it. All they had to do was drain the water out of the cooling jacket and the reaction would stop. Neutrons reflected back into the uranium solution from the jacket were all that was maintaining the fission. It seemed simple, but it turned out that it was a lot easier to put water into the jacket than it was to remove it. The piping would have to be disassembled, and it could be done from outside the walls of the plant, but the radiation was still too high for men to work on the plumbing. They had to approach the pipes in relays, with each man allowed to absorb no more than 10 rem (0.1 sievert) of radiation.
Just to make sure, they pumped a borax solution into the tank through a rubber hose.183
Hisashi Ouchi, 35 years old, had received about 1,700 rem of mixed radiation. He was burned over most of his body, and his white-blood-cell count had dropped to near zero. He died 82 days later of multiple organ failure. Masato Shinohara, 40 years old, expired on April 27, 2000, 210 days after the accident. He had absorbed 1,000 rem, teetering on the border of a fatal dose. Yutaka Yokokawa was hit with 300 rem. He left the hospital on December 20, 1999, and he is still alive and well.184
At least 439 plant workers, firemen, and emergency responders were exposed to high levels of radiation, as were 207 residents near the plant. Although their exposures were probably 1,000 times the normal background radiation, there have been no unusual sickness or radiation effects reported from these people. The mindset at all levels of the JCO organization and the government regulators had been that no such accident was possible, and therefore there were no accident plans, no review of work procedures, and little thought was put into the equipment layout. The workers were minimally trained, and the primary goal was for everyone to work more efficiently. The Japanese work ethic, for all its strengths, would have to be modified for this peculiar line of endeavor. The JCO uranium-conversion activities ceased in 2003, due to regulatory pressures and dwindling profits, and Japan’s high hopes for nuclear power suffered along with the rest of the economy in a decades-long recession.
United States.185 With so little information to go on, speculation ran rampant and wild theories rushed into the vacuum. All we had was a trickle of partial, confusing reports taken third-hand from some excitable defectors or exiles. We could not even tell when this contaminating incident had occurred, with dates ranging from 1954 to 1961. It looked as if several lesser incidents may have been woven together into a combined story.
What type of accident was it? It was variously described as an earthquake, a landslide, an accidental A-bomb detonation, a test-drop from a Soviet bomber, a reactor explosion, a graphite fire in a reactor, a meteor hit, and a steam explosion in a holding tank. No explanation made sense, and overflights by U-2 spy planes trying to find visual confirmation of a nuclear catastrophe were curtailed by the loss of Gary Powers’s plane over Mayak. Articles, papers, and even books were written about it, but the mystery of what happened at Kyshtym would not be solved until the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union in 1989.
The first published inkling of a radiological problem in the East Ural Mountains claims to be the
June 1958 edition of Cosmic Voice, the monthly journal of The Aetherius Society.186 On April 18, 1958, George King, founder of the society in 1955, was contacted telepathically by two
beings riding around in a UFO.187 The first message was from an individual identified only by origin, Mars Sector 6:
Owing to an atomic accident just recently in the USSR, a great amount of radioactivity in the shape of radioactive iodine, strontium 90, radioactive nitrogen and radioactive sodium have been released into the atmosphere of Terra.
All forms of reception from Interplanetary sources will become a little more difficult during the next few weeks because of the foolish actions of Russia. They have not yet declared to the world as a whole, exactly what happened in one of their atomic research establishments. Neither have they declared how many people were killed there. Neither have they declared that they were really frightened by the tremendous release of radioactive materials from this particular establishment during the
The report goes on to claim that the Interplanetary Parliament will have to use an enormous amount of energy to clean up this mess. They were, however, able by Divine Intervention to save 17,000,000 people from having been "forced to vacate their physical bodies,” which may be a euphemism meaning to die of acute radiation poisoning. They were given permission by the Lords of Karma to intervene on behalf of Terra, presumably in cooperation with Divine Intervention.
This brief announcement was followed by mention of the contamination accident in a book, You Are Responsible!, published by The Aetherius Society in 1961, and there it sat for another 15 years, with no further mention outside certain secretive compartments in the CIA.
On November 4, 1976, an article, “Two Decades of Dissidence,” was published in the New Scientist magazine for its 20th anniversary issue. The author, Zhores A. Medvedev, a Soviet biologist, had gone into exile in London with his family in 1972 and gotten a job as senior research scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research. In his article, he mentioned that in 1957 or 1958 an explosive accident had contaminated a thousand square kilometers of territory in the Ural Mountains with radioactive debris. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands had to be evacuated, and the area would be a danger zone from now on. The New Scientist, aware of the stale claim by The Aetherious Society, proclaimed “Scooped by a UFO!” on a back page. Medvedev’s story was roundly denounced as “science fiction,” and was thrown into the same box with the Aetherions.
accidents.188 It was true that the Soviets had six graphite reactors at Mayak, which was then known as Chelyabinsk-40, but it would be hard for a graphite reactor fire or even a graphite steam explosion to kill hundreds of people unless they were standing on top of it, and how were thousands injured, needing immediate hospitalization? Not even Soviet engineering would place production reactors so close together that an explosion in one could set off the others. A single plutonium production reactor, for all its buildup of radioactivity, is limited in the damage it can do. While it would be possible to contaminate thousands of square kilometers with plutonium and fission products, this would be a low-level contamination. It would be a long-term danger and not producing immediate injuries. A seismic event that would swallow Chelyabinsk-40 would have showed up on seismographs around the world, and a destructive landslide in the heavily wooded Urals seemed unlikely.
Medvedev reasoned that it must have been an underground storage tank filled with waste products from the plutonium processing, heating up in the confined space and causing a sudden, massive steam explosion from the water content of the solutions. It seemed almost plausible, but fresh, concentrated fission waste, straight out of a reactor that had been running at full power, only generates about 60 kilowatts of heat per ton. After a year of sitting quietly, the same waste is putting out 16 kilowatts of heat, and after ten years the rate has fallen to 2 kilowatts per ton. This is certainly enough heat to melt through a steel tank or even to blow the thing wide open, but it lacks the power concentration to cause the reported level of mayhem. Even if left-over plutonium were to make a supercritical mass in a waste tank, it would simply boil the water furiously until it modified its own configuration into subcriticality. As we have seen in all the criticality accidents, to be killed you must have been embracing the reactor. The
reported power of the blast did not correspond to what would be contained in a steel storage tank.
Shortly after Medvedev’s article appeared in the New Scientist, articles appeared in three British newspapers seeming to confirm his incredible story. The newspaper articles, all appearing on December 7, 1976, linked back to a letter to the editor in the Jerusalem Post, sent in by another ex-Soviet, Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of the Biophysics Laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Molecular Biology. Tumerman had written to strongly disagree with Medvedev’s assertion that the supposed accident could have been the result of a reactor explosion. It was common knowledge in Russia, he claimed, that the catastrophe was the result of gross negligence on an industrial scale. He was not sure how, but the careless storage of radioactive wastes at Chelyabinsk-40 had resulted in massive destruction.
Tumerman had not been there at the time, but in an automobile trip in 1960 he had seen evidence of a disaster with his own eyes. He had been visiting his brother, an engineer, at the construction site of the Byeloyarsk power reactor, about 300 kilometers from Sverdlovsk in the Southern Ural Mountains. From there he had to drive about 180 kilometers to Miassovo, near Chelyabinsk-40, for a summer seminar on genetics. He reached the main highway heading south at about 5 a. m., and soon he passed a large declarative road sign. It was a warning to all drivers: DO NOT STOP FOR THE NEXT 30 KILOMETERS! DRIVE THROUGH AT MAXIMUM SPEED!
Curious about what he had seen on the drive to Miassovo, he got an earful from some seminar participants. The whole countryside was hot from radiation contamination. It was caused by an explosion at either the plutonium production plant or a waste tank. Details were fuzzy, but thousands had been evacuated permanently, and their houses were burned down to prevent looters from hauling away contaminated objects and spreading the radiation farther than it was. Everyone called it the “Kyshtym Disaster.” It actually occurred at Chelyabinsk-40, but Chelyabinsk-40 officially did not exist, and Kyshtym was the nearest town on the map. No further details were forthcoming, and experts were puzzled. Finally, in 1989, formerly secret files concerning the Kyshtym Disaster started finding their way out of the crumbling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the unexpected truth began to crystallize. Nobody had speculated correctly.
Under the Stalin and later the Khrushchev governments in the Soviet Union, the safety of the environment and even workers was not exactly a primary concern. The six graphite plutonium — production reactors at Chelyabinsk-40 used open-loop water cooling, pumping water out of Lake Kyzyltash and dumping it back in. At first, liquid waste from the plutonium extraction plant was simply dumped into the River Ob and allowed to empty into the Arctic Ocean. In 1948, plutonium production was at a fever pitch, and there was no time to work out the details of making the process efficient. It was extremely important that a nuclear weapon be successfully tested before the official celebration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday, which would be on December 18, 1948. They did not quite make it, but the RDS-1 plutonium-fueled bomb was
successfully tested on August 29, 1949. The rest of the world was stunned by this development, thinking that the Soviet Union was farther behind than that.
In 1956, a cooling-water pipe broke leading to one of the tanks. It would be a lot of work to dig up the tank, find the leak, and replace the pipe, so instead of going to all that trouble, the engineers in charge just turned off the water and forgot about it.
Hall several times, being heated to the detonation point and laced with dangerous nuclides.189
It took a while for the government to rush into damage-control mode. A week later, the Chelyabinsk newspaper published a cheery story concerning the rare display of northern lights in the sky last Sunday, showing “intense red light, sometimes crossing into pale pink and pale blue glow.” It “occupied a large portion of the southwest and northeast part of the sky.” At the same time, massive evacuation measures were enforced, eventually emptying 22 villages along what would become known as the “East Urals Radioactive Trace,” or the EURT. No explanation was given as to why everybody had to leave. Over the next two years, around 10,000 people were permanently relocated. The reason for storing nitrate solution and organic solution together in the same tank has not been revealed. The EURT is now disguised as the “East-Ural Nature Reserve,” as an explanation for its prohibited access.
Studies of the effects of this disaster are extremely difficult, as records do not exist, and previous residents are hard to track down. A late study by the former Soviet Health Ministry cites 8,015 delayed deaths due to radiation effects in the area from 1962 to 1992, but on the other hand only 6,000 death certificates from all causes of death have been found. Add to that the possibility that just about everybody over 12 years old in the area smoked Turkish cigarettes, and cause of death is a toss-up between lung cancer and the effects of alcoholism. There are no hard records of immediate deaths due to the chemical explosion or acute radiation poisoning on site. Recent epidemiological studies suggest that 49 to 55 people along the EURT have died because of radiation-induced cancer, and at what is now the Mayak plant, 66 workers suffer from chronic radiation sickness dating back to 1957.
All this ranks the Kyshtym Disaster as possibly the worst, most senseless catastrophe in the history of nuclear power. Hopefully the conditions that caused it have subsided and this will never happen again. There would be more mischief in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the world became more information-conscious, and we will have a hard look at it. But first, let us examine how all those nuclear weapons, cited as necessary for world peace, were handled with loving care by the Armed Forces.
162Big Ed (six foot two) was one of nine members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) as well as senior member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. He and the other senator from Colorado, Eugene Millikan, were able to divert some big, important projects to their state, including the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD, an A-bomb-proof headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain), the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and a lot of uranium mining. The Rocky Flats plant was their crowning achievement. Big Ed eventually made a disastrous slip of the tongue in a live television show, “Court of Current Issues,” in New York on November 1, 1949. Johnson casually mentioned that the United States was developing the hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than what we had dropped on Japan. Television being what it was in 1949, it took a while for this incredible announcement to sink in, but the Washington Post took hold of it on November 18. The project was now subjected to the blinding glare of public opinion, and there would be no more quiet examination of the issues. President Truman was not pleased, and he wrote a one-sentence “Dear Ed” letter to Senator Johnson on December 17.
163The workers named the underpass ravine “sheep dip.” There was no drain at the lowest point in the dip, and anything dropped on the floor would eventually end up there. Visiting physicists renamed this feature the “Lamb dip,” having to do with the spectral hole in the HeNe laser cavity at 1.1 microns. The humor went over most heads.
172The radiation dose specification of “rad” (Radiation Acquired Dose) used in the official reports is now considered obsolete. It is often expressed in “rem” (Roentgen Equivalent Man,” because radiation counters are calibrated in rem, but that specification has been replaced with the sievert by the Systeme international d’unites, and the rad has been replaced by the “gray” The estimate of Kelley’s total dose has been revised a few times, and it may have been as high as 18,000 rems, or 180 sieverts. The only important point of these numbers is that that much radiation could have killed him 18 times.
174The trichloroethylene (TCE) used in the wash-out step is incorrectly referred to as trichlorethane (chlorothene) in A Review of Criticality Accidents: 2000 Revision (LA-13638) by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Trichlorethylene was originally formulated in Great Britain as a general anesthetic to replace chloroform, but by 1956 better, less-toxic substitutes were found. Since the 1970s it has been widely banned from use in the food and medical industries, and is considered a carcinogen. Exposure to it seems to lead to Parkinson’s disease.
176The first edition did not have the photographs, but there were at least eight editions, and the helpful photos were added. There were over 170,000 copies of the U. S. edition alone, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list until late January 1946. A British edition was published in 1945, and eventually it was published in 40 languages all around the world. At the top of page iv is written: “Reproduction in whole or part is authorized and permitted.”
178Powers returned home to a cold reception. The CIA was upset because he had not hit the self-destruct button in the U-2, nor had he injected himself with the suicide needle, hidden in a coin. He got a job as a test pilot for Lockheed, and later as a news helicopter pilot. He died in 1977 when covering brush fires in Santa Barbara County when his helicopter ran out of fuel. Although he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner back in the USSR, Rudolf Abel (Willie Fisher) failed to recruit or even identify a single Soviet agent in his eight-year deployment in New York City His cover began to unravel in 1953 when his assistant, a Finnish alcoholic, accidentally spent a nickel containing a microphotograph of a coded message. A newsboy dropped the nickel, and the hollowed-out coin split in half, revealing the strange film negative inside. It was downhill from there, and Abel was captured in 1957.
179The existing record of what happened at Mayak was given to the team at Los Alamos compiling A Review of Criticality Accidents in 1993 by Gennadiy S. Stardubtsev and A. P Suslov This particular report is unusual, in that no written papers or articles were referenced, and the account is apparently taken from memory and notes. This documentation does not specify how the shift supervisor was able to talk the radiation supervisor into leaving him in front of the room. In my imagining of the situation, the shift supervisor probably told the radiation supervisor that he needed to make sure that the heavily dosed operator had not spread radiation all over the floors and walls on his way to decontamination. He would wait quietly here while the radiation supervisor checked it out with his instrument. Radiation supervisor left, reminding shift supervisor not to move.
180We may never know his name, but the night shift supervisor at the Mayak plutonium extraction building was awarded the not-coveted 1994 Darwin Award. The Darwin is given to that individual who has taken his or her (usually his) self out of the gene pool by doing something really stupid, therefore proving that evolution works by not allowing people who should not reproduce to do so. http://darwinawards. com/darwin/darwin1994-25.html
186I would prefer to think that there was an earlier leak of the story possibly in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende in April 1958. The event was not widely noticed by the Western press.
189ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil) is a tertiary explosive, commonly used as a blasting agent, consisting of a mixture of an oxidizer, ammonium nitrate, plus a flammable organic compound. On August 24, 1970, one ton of ANFO loaded into a Ford Econoline van was parked in front of the physics building, Sterling Hall, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a protest against the university’s military research, the explosive mixture was detonated at 3:42 am., causing massive destruction. Parts of the van were found three blocks away on top of an eight-story building, and overall damage to the university campus was over $2.1 million. A radical anti-war group called the “New Year’s Gang” claimed responsibility, and one member, Leo Burt, remains at large.
Chapter 8